Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Folk Remedy- “Hot Toddy”

Nationality: Italian (Sicilian)-American
Age: 74
Occupation: Medical Doctor
Residence: Mount Kisco, NY
Performance Date: April 26, 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Italian; Sicilian dialect

Remedy: a “hot toddy,” or warm drink consisting of tea, lemon, and “one shot to half of a shot” of whiskey.

The informant states that the above drink is supposed to be a remedy for the “cold, flu, or if you are feeling under the weather.” He learned this in childhood from many of the “elders” of his family or friends—“particularly the older generation of men”—who would suggest this as a remedy. The informant states that whether or not the remedy is used may “depend on how badly you feel” but is “kind of arbitrary”: you may use it “one time and not another.” The informant claims to have only used the remedy himself “two to three times” and didn’t really remember how well it worked, stating “maybe once it made me feel better, but I’m mostly guessing.”

As can be seen from the statements of the informant, a medical doctor, he possessed no strong opinion either way as to the efficacy of  the “hot toddy” remedy. One thing that was interesting, however, was that he remarked that “there’s more of a tendency for those who have used it [in the past] to use it every time they feel under the weather,” which, though the informant didn’t explicitly make this accusation, may attest to the propensity of this drink to be used more for its whiskey content than for its specific salutary use for ailments. Similarly, the informant’s statement that it was the “older generation of men” who proposed this drink as a remedy makes one wonder whether the concept of a “hot toddy” might not have been used merely as a good way to make light of (as in a euphemism; cf. “grandpa’s old cough syrup”) or conceal one’s propensity for liquor consumption.

Folk Belief/Myth/Ritual/Folk Religion- Thailand

Nationality: Thai
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bangkok, Thailand
Performance Date: April 22, 2011
Primary Language: Thai (laotian)
Language: English

In Thailand, people believe that solar eclipses are caused by the Hindu god Rahu putting the son in his mouth. And this causes bad luck to everyone. Then, in order to get out of this bad luck, you have to pray to him and give him eight, black things, because eight represents his number in Indian astrology, and these things have to be black because his skin is black and because of the darkness/blackness caused by him swallowing the sun. These eight black things are:

  1. Black chicken
  2. Black liquor
  3. Black coffee
  4. Black jelly
  5. Black sticky rice
  6. Black beans
  7. Black dessert (specific Thai dessert like a black custard)
  8. Black egg

You go outside of your house and put all eight of these things on a table and burn incense and then pray to Rahu. This makes him take bad luck away from you and even give you good luck.

The informant states that he learned this item from his mother, around 13 or 14 years of age, at home, most likely because he had heard about it and sought more information from his mother. He wouldn’t tell anyone about this item unless they asked him about it first; rather, he claims he “would only talk about it if there was an actual solar eclipse” in which case he might tell friends, his brother, his cousins, or anyone “close enough” to him. To the informant, the item doesn’t “make sense,” and he asks: “Why if god created everything does he need anything from you?” According to the informant, the ritual was “just created by people to make themselves feel happy or safe from the bad luck.”

The above piece of Thai folklore is a good example of a “conversion” superstition or folk belief, whereby some highly specific and perhaps ritualized action or set of actions is taken in order to ward-off bad luck. In this case, the actions are gathering eight specific items together, all of a black color, placing them on a table outside of one’s house, burning incense, and praying to the god Rahu, all in that order. The conversion superstition here does not, therefore, merely involve an action which stands on its own—for instance, knocking on wood or throwing salt over one’s shoulder—but it bears a significant relation to another being, the Hindu god Rahu, whose swallowing of the sun was the source of bad luck. In this sense, it is also a form of supplication or a religious act done for the sake of a god. As the informant notes, however, most people who adhere to this folk belief in Thailand are in fact not Hindu, but rather Buddhist, and thus the practice clearly falls outside of what is considered necessary to be a good Buddhist, constituting a form of folk religion. The informant even states that the belief contradicts the core of Buddhist belief since “Buddha teaches that you should rely on yourself not on the god.”

Finally, the item is also interesting in that it exemplifies the myth-ritualist perspective which holds that a ritual is intimately connected to, and perhaps even the performance of, a myth itself. Failure to perform the sacred rite correctly can have dire consequences which, for Thai people holding the above folk belief, would be the persistence of bad luck caused by the eclipse. Unlike most myths, however, which are stories transpiring outside the boundaries of profane space and time, occurring instead in a sort of sacred plane, the narrative of the Hindu god Rahu swallowing the sun and causing a solar eclipse must in fact take place in the here and now since we know that solar eclipses do in fact occur in this world. The explanatory power, or literal truth, of the myth seems nevertheless to have been abandoned by the Thai people with the offering of modern-day scientific explanations for why solar eclipses occur, according to the informant. The ritual performance—the “conversion” superstition—seems therefore to be substantially more important than the myth to which it is tied. The main concern for those who adhere to this belief, then, is the visiting of bad luck upon them, and how they are able to combat this through the ritual.

Scar Remedy

Nationality: Hispanic
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/25/11
Primary Language: English

“If you have scars you have to put Vitamin E oil on them.  I don’t know why but my mom tells me to do it, and I’ve had like a billon people telling me to do it.”

The informant, Julia, was recently hit by a car.  Although she did not have any major injuries, she has scaring on her face and several areas on her body.  She performs this folk remedy everyday in order to heal her scars.  She learned this piece of folk medicine from her mother and also from friends.  This folk medicine is so widespread that she reports that at least one person tell her to use Vitamin E oil when they hear about her accident.

I believe this folk remedy to be affective.  Although I have not used it myself, I have seen several people’s scars begin to go away after using Vitamin E oil.  If so many people are using Vitamin E oil to help their scaring disappear it must be working.

Joke/Blason Populaire- Singapore

Nationality: Indonesian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bali, Indonesia
Performance Date: April 25, 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Indonesian, Chinese

“What do you call Indians in an orange boat?” Answer: “A papaya.”

The informant states that she learned this joke from a friend, when she was probably around 15 years old, while at dinner in an Indian restaurant in Singapore, where she was currently studying. She would tell it to friends when making jokes about Indian people, which she claims commonly occurs since there are “so many” Indians in Singapore. Her opinion of the joke was that “it’s funny and kind of true.”

The joke given above clearly relies for its humor not on an abstract property or stereotype of Indians but on a very basic, phenotypical attribute—their skin tone—which according to the joke, is so dark that they look like the dark seeds of a papaya fruit, which are enclosed by an orange layer (i.e. “the orange boat”). It also seems worth noting that the informant correlated the prevalence of such jokes about Indians with the large presence of that group in the region where the jokes were told. Similar to dead baby jokes, which seem to arise during periods where there is an extraordinary number of births and focus on infants, such as during so-called “baby booms,” the prominence of these sorts of Indian jokes, which seem somewhat mean-spirited like their dead-baby counterparts, may be a counter-reaction by another competing cultural sub-group, or perhaps the dominate culture itself, which feels threatened by the growing presence of the group that is mocked. This trend of portraying “the other” in a negative way, which has undoubtedly characterized the dynamics of the myriad groups of immigrants that have arrived to the “melting pot” of America as well (particularly during the peaks of immigration), thus carries over the frustrations—economic, cultural, or otherwise—of one group with another into the realm of that group’s folklore, which its members share with one another.

Folk Medicine-China

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 24, 2011
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

“When I went to China I went to this..uh..province called Yunnan. I know like those minority group people, like when they want to stay healthy they eat a little bit of silver. A very little bit. Because you know too much is bad for you. They take like this (points to bracelet) and boil it to get the top layer off, and then they put it in their water, and it floats on top, and they drink it. Not a lot at once, but little by little throughout their life.”

            Jamie is my roommate. She is an international student from Hong Kong, here at the University of Southern California to study film production. She found this folk medicine interesting because it was something very different than she was used to seeing, living in Hong Kong. She explained to me that people in the provinces have different customs and lifestyles than the people in the city, which is why she took a trip out to this province as a tourist.

            This anecdote shows me an example in which the nation-state model is not necessarily accurate. Parts of the same nation are different enough that a Chinese native can be surprised by the differences in culture nearby. It’s easy to attribute many cultural differences across the United States as resulting from the different ethnic influences in each area; however in Jamie’s case, Americans would consider her and the people of Yunnan to be of the same ethnicity because they belong to one nation-state. In America, they would both be considered Chinese, when in China, they belong to different folk groups.